Why Don't We Trust Angry Women?

A study finds that when men get angry, they get results. As for women ...

We’ve seen everyone from political candidates to movie stars lose their temper from time to time. And while they may suffer some temporary condemnation, depending on the situation, most manage to escape with their reputation intact. But based on new research on anger expression, it would appear that angry women are less likely to emerge unscathed than their male counterparts.

All of us, of course, are subject to evaluation by other people when we lose our temper. You’ve undoubtedly seen angry customers lose it when things don’t go their way. What are your impressions of those irate shoppers? If you’ve been at the receiving end of one of these diatribes, how do you react?

Arguments with your romantic partner, friends, or colleagues can also take an angry turn when disagreements get severe enough. You want to convince your partner to spend the weekend with your favorite relatives, but your other half just wants to have some alone time with you. It makes you angry to think that you’ll miss out on family fun because of what you think is your partner’s selfishness.

Political candidates make their living involved in nothing but arguments, whether on the floor of their legislature or in a televised debate. Emotions can get heated. Most recently, we saw Hillary Clinton defend decisions made after the Benghazi attack as she testified for hours in front of a congressional hearing. She never once expressed anger and even made a few jokes. Donald Trump, on the other hand, regularly goes on angry offensives against opponents and the media. Though it’s not always appreciated, many of his followers say, “Bring it on.”

In a study that won several prizes, Arizona State University psychologist Jessica Salerno, with University of Chicago-Illinois psychologist Liana Peter-Hagene (2015), investigated what happens when women and men become angry during jury deliberations. In these situations, jurors often find themselves needing to sway the opinions of others. The stakes are high: The jury’s decision will decide the fate of another human being, and if they get it wrong, an innocent man or woman may be sentenced, or a guilty party go scot-free. Emotions run high and speeches can be very passionate.

If women and men are perceived differently when they express their anger in impassioned speeches, then their influence on fellow jurors should reflect these impressions. If you’re taken seriously when you get angry, you may persuade others to change their mind; if you’re viewed as a lightweight, you’ll be ignored.

To create a scenario that would reproduce what juries do in a controlled experimental setting, Salerno and Peter-Hagene recruited an ethnically diverse sample of 210 undergraduates (about two-thirds of them female) to participate in a computer simulation of the deliberation process. Participants read transcripts from an actual murder trial, saw photographs of the crime scene, and viewed several other photos that weren’t from the trial but gave the scenario greater credibility. The evidence was sufficiently ambiguous to lead participants in a prior study to vote for conviction only 62% of the time; in the present study, 43% of participants arrived at a guilty verdict.

After deciding on their verdict, participants encountered the simulated jury deliberation. They read scripts from other jurors in which one “holdout” refused to go along with the majority opinion. The holdout was identified by name as either a male or a female, and their arguments contained anger (“Seriously, this just makes me angry”), fear (“It scares me to think about how…”), or no emotion at all.

The fear condition was important because the researchers needed to control for the expression of any emotion. If fear and anger produced the same reaction, then one could argue that the effects were due to emotional arousal rather than the specific effects of anger.

Salerno and Peter-Hagene measured the influence on jurors of being exposed to these conditions by having them rate the confidence they had in their initial verdict both before and after reading the scripts from the holdouts. The key question would be whether the participants became less confident in their verdict after reading what the holdout had to say.

The team's findings presented clear evidence that men and women have differing influence when they express opinions in an angry manner. Participants were more likely to doubt their initial judgments after hearing what an angry male holdout had to say, but were more confident in their own judgments after reading the angry woman’s arguments. Everything in the two conditions was the same—except the holdout’s gender.

As Salerno and Peter-Hegene observed (p. 9), “Expressing anger created a gender gap in influence that did not exist before the holdout started expressing anger or when the holdouts expressed fear or no emotion.” This effect was specific to anger, not fear. Further analyses revealed the reason for this gender gap: Participants regarded an angry woman as more emotional, which made them more confident in their own opinion.

Credibility played an interesting role in this process: Both the credibility and the emotionality of female holdouts influenced how much confidence participants had in their own original verdict. However, when the female holdout expressed anger, credibility no longer played a predictive role. It’s as if the participants discounted an angry woman entirely and instead became more confident in their initial verdict. For men, on the other hand, expressing anger made them seem more credible, which, in turn, led participants to become less confident in their own verdict.

These findings have troubling implications about how seriously women are taken compared to men when they behave in the exact same way. As the authors note:

“Our results lend scientific support to a frequent claim voiced by women, sometimes dismissed as paranoia: that people would have listened to her impassioned argument, had she been a man” (p. 11).

The Hillarys of the world may feel the need to keep stifling their anger when people ask annoying questions, while the Donalds can let their rants go unchecked. And the ordinary woman who wishes to be heard may have to suppress her passion, no matter how strongly she feels about her point of view.

Research such as the ASU study can help shed light on the complex ways our biases influence the way we perceive men and women. We may hope that one day this research will allow people, regardless of gender, to allow us to achieve fulfillment by expressing our true passions.

James, this article is not about how psychology favors Hillary over Trump it's about how women are taken less seriously than men when they get angry. There's no way to tell whether either Hillary or Trump believe in what they're saying because it's politics. They also have different personalities that's why one yells and the other doesn't

this is very good timing your writing this piece i wonder then now after curtaling my temper can i get heard!? by the man i love whom i have i fear elianated wiv my past outbursts, but i have worked very hard at stopping this . my partner says i am a changed woman n can c my effort i sufferd frm mood swings which have been brought under control now . but now i find wen i speak calmly he's not listening to me and ends my sentences b4 i get a chance to say somthing or speaks over me . i feel all the work i have done on my own temper has left him with respect from me!! but not the other way round i feel im loosing hope n getting subdued as i feel i cant express myself wivout being egnored it feels like passive agressive behaviour on his part . i dont know if he knows how bad he is or does and is purposfully doing it please can somone advice me on how get heard as a woman !! :/ ?

You are right, women do tend to cry when they are feeling emotional. On the other hand, a reasonable amount of men, just prefers to act like apes when they are angry. Honestly, as uncomfortable as it is to see someone cry, I prefer it to seeing some idiot jumping up and down, shouting and, usually, cussing.

Yes, an angry woman is usually a weak woman, because mainstream society says so! I have worked with this personality type, and it's no picnic (especially when they are the supervisor). In the end, anger is almost always an expression of weakness, and in the professional and corporate world, there is always someone ready to capitalize on this unfortunate trait.

If angry men are seen as tough and competent while angry women are automatI cally seen by both seen as being stupid nutcases (both can be angry about ranting over the exact same thing), then what hope is there for equality between the sexes? That's right, none. I think if everyone just stopped focusing on what women are supposed to be doing/ how women are supposed to behave, then we may have a chance at seeing each other as halfway equal human beings. But if we have the patriarchs on one side dictating that the women's place is in the home, while we have the feminists on the other side dictating that women should be these high-octane, do it all have it all types who are never satisfied with what they have/do, God help them if they areb't better rhn anyone else,then how could we possibly reach equality? I would say live your life, do what you want and do it to the best of your ability, let the chips fall where they may, find your happiness within-this goes for both sexes.

the patriarchal role of men is to be aggressive and violent, able to submit women; that's why an angry man is taken seriously.
the role of women in the patriarchal structure is to be submissive, a non-being; that's why angry women confuse people and seem not convincing, and also why calm spoken women are accepted widely.
getting rid of the patriarchal structure is one thing, but, dear psychology, how do we get rid of these so deeply ingrained patriarchal beliefs and habits?

While angry, aggressive, and violent women in public will mostly likely get dismissed as them just being on they're period. Men have it much better, we won't get dismissed, we will just have a group of random strangers tackle us to the ground and then call the police and have us arrested.

All biases come from somewhere. Could it be that many men have been dishonestly manipulated by a woman who used her emotions as a weapon? I overheard my ex-wife telling a friend exactly how she constantly exaggerated her emotions to get me to do what she wanted. And they were both laughing about how they got away with murder while on their periods. Well, I called her out on this behavior and that's why she's my ex-wife.